


Dreaming In Technicolor

by manorsmalfoy



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Catholicism, Color Blindness, Depression, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mentions Of Amy - Freeform, References to Suicide, Religion, ULA - Freeform, general itf trigger warnings tbh, mild swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 01:06:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9795467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manorsmalfoy/pseuds/manorsmalfoy
Summary: After the rising, the color drains from Kieren's world, until someone shades it in again.





	

    Since the day Kieren Walker had clawed his way out of the ground, purple fingernails newly ragged and bleeding and caked with the dirt of his own grave, the world had been monochrome. In his untreated state, hungry for flesh and consumed in his search for it with single-minded precision, he had not lingered on it. He had hobbled, back still stiff and straight with the rigor of death and the awkward pillowing of the silk coffin lining, a few uncertain steps into the ill-lit graveyard, strange and familiar all at once, and craned his neck so his face met the swirling wind he could no longer feel. He stood there, the old church bells ringing the last clumsy, battered tolls of midnight, until his neighbors began to stir and push their fingers through the soaked earth like grubby, writhing flowers; then, unencumbered by morals and pain and other human weakness, he embarked on this primal task with his new people.

Now, somewhat himself again but somehow more different, Kieren mourned the loss of the only secure happiness in his first life; color. The universe, he thought, was playing one sick fucking joke after the next; bring the suicidal teenager back from death. Return to him the soldier he had killed himself over, and then have that boy murdered when he finally choose Kieren over politics. Reanimate the depressed artist, who only found comfort in painting, and make him color-blind. 

Color-blind may have been a little oversimplified, it was more as if Kieren's sense of the spectrum had been left behind when he rose from the grave, or the great beyond, or whatever. At the treatment center, he had assumed that seeing the world printed in grayscale was a side-effect of dying in 2009 and coming back to life a handful of years later. When he had asked how they were supposed to tell the colored contacts meant to hide their now-pale, unnerving eyes, apart, the doctors at Norfolk Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferer Rehabilitation and Reintegration Center had immediately taken him deeper into the laboratory then he had ever ventured for countless examinations. After failing every test their brilliant, living minds could construe, the scientists had abandoned him in pursuit of other priorities, figuring it was caused by natural tissue degeneration in the years before he had partially returned to life. 

And with that, they had parceled him up and sent him on his merry fucking monochromatic way. At least Roarton was a fairly monochromatic place; it seemed somewhat fitting that he would be returning to see it as he once felt it. Now, though, he found himself squinting at the threads in his mother's favorite worn blanket draped over the back of the couch, trying to force the garish orange back into the unraveling strands. The memories from his past life remained vivid, and untampered, locked away somewhere safe in his brain for his own perusal. He had taken to inspecting them daily, peering closely at each preserved detail like a museum curator, watching them for faded or frayed edges. 

Early in his return to the town of his first life, Kieren had ventured into the carefully maintained shrine of his room. He was shocked that his parents had not only kept it after his suicide, but someone, likely his mother, had regularly ventured in to clean and prevent dust from building up. The Walkers had a perverse dislike for direct eye contact with the uncomfortable, but the room felt far too unchanged to have been packed up and back out again, or to have built up with dust in his absence and cleared in his sudden return. He had stared at his paintings and pencil drawings he knew he had once shaded in with color. He focused on each painstaking, newly gray brushstroke, remembering the hours spent mixing for the perfect shade of Rick's eyes, of Jem's hair, of the glint in his mother's eye that no other being could seem to replicate.

Numbly, he waited for something, anything, to rise up in his throat and choke him, some emotion or pained animal noise. When none came, he sunk down on the bed, searching for any response, to no avail; he remained as hollow as the empty hole he had left in the graveyard. He started at the particles swirling in the pale, unearthly sunlight, finally as disturbed by his presence as Kieren was, for longer than he knew. Finally, abandoned by color and its comforting energy, he sunk down until he was lying on his stomach, limbs dangling across the bed, turned his back to the ceiling. The intense glare of his mother's now uninhabited eyes was broken, and he fell into a restless sleep.

* * *

When Kieren awoke on his first day back, hours later, the whole house had darkened, his bedside lamp feebly attempting to illuminate the shadows of the room. The first thing he did that night was grab every towel or blanket he could find and drape them over his treasured works, just as he had done the bathroom mirror. Some hung from hastily placed nails, others were propped against shelves or walls, and a few more painful canvases were shoved to the back of his closet and hidden with the many layers he had worn during life. Kieren then sat down at his second-hand desk and bent over a blank spiral pad he had never gotten around to filling. He let out a darkly amused huff of breath at that; now, he had all the time in the world.

The boy picked up an old stick of charcoal between his long fingers and took a deep, shuddering breath his lungs didn’t need, but his mind appreciated. Suddenly, he gripped the implement harder, knuckles already pale but whitening more still, and jammed it to the page, and began drawing in furious, dark strokes. Heavy handed figures began to take form in the darkening book; smudged, angry limbs and grasping hands, ravaged figures lying in pools of black, teeth encrusted with horrific brine, and dirt, so much dirt and mud and soot. For the first time since the rising, Kieren thought that if he could have cried, he would have thick tears rolling down his face and dripping from his chin. Finally, something had chased away the fog that filled his veins and made him feel weightless, detached, and echoes of feeling were replacing the vacancy inside of him, reverberating off the walls of his stomach. Kieren did not stop drawing, filling, overflowing, until the tips of his fingers began to stub against the chalky page; he had ground the entire stick into the page. 

Straightening up for the first time since he had begun, Kieren realized that the first early light of morning had already started to seep into the Roarton. He looked at his hands, smeared withuneven clouds of black, creating the illusion of nightmarish bruises fading into his gray skin. The boy limped slowly to the bathroom, trying to keep as quiet as his stiff body would allow, and washed the charcoal from his hands shamefully, as if it was blood swirling down the drain.

* * *

 

Kieren Walker marveled at the change in his town of gray, how the time that seemed to span in his first life, uninterrupted and lazy and so maddeningly _dull_ , had morphed into fast sequences of emotional and intense moments after the second rising. He had met Amy Dyer, for real, this time, been overwhelmed by the way that someone so dead could seem so full of life. He had struggled to make sense of her bright colors, and had a laugh startled out of him by her exaggerated, yet somehow sincere reactions. It had been a long time since he had laughed, he realized then, and his mouth had turned up in unfamiliar corners. Once he started smiling around her, he suddenly wasn’t able to stop; he knew it looked unnatural, a stilted quirk of lips, but he awoke something slumbering in him again, like drawing had, but less intensely. More light, he realized. Light was spilling into him, and he wanted desperately to turn his unfeeling face towards its rays. 

Now, he wondered if he had taken too much light from Amy, draining her second existence like an elixir without filling her up in return. If that had caused her— 

A voice in Kieren’s interrupted the errant thought, firmly, sounding suspiciously like Amy. _Don’t you dare, Handsome,_ she scolded. _This wasn’t your fault._

Shaking his head, as if to clear it, he grabbed an old jacket from a pile in the corner of his room (What? He was stuck at 18 for the rest of his life. He didn’t have to grow up, really), and abandoned his restless pacing in favor of aimless wandering. He walked, thinking of nothing but grayscale, while his legs seemed to have their own destination in mind. He found himself on the doorstep of Amy’s— well, now Simon’s, he corrected— bungalow, and _Simon._ Jesus Christ, Simon. The older man had his back to him, abandoning his sweater for an old, oversized work shirt and torn jeans. Long-sleeved, as always; Simon Monroe was an odd collection of contradiction, refusing to cover up his ghostly skin and piercing pale eyes, but keeping the tell-tale track marks in the crook of his elbows out of sight.Kieren liked to imagine what Simon would look like in technicolor, the raven gloss of his hair and the ghostly blue-purple undertones in his skin.He was sloppily painting over at least three different types of graffiti—the typical _Die Rotter Scum!_ characteristic of Roarton , _JUDAS WHO HAD BETRAYED HIM,_ and a quickly abandoned start of “PD—“ where the Parrish Council had presumably began to brand the bungalow as the home of a PDS sufferer before being chased off, likely by the man himself. 

Kieren sauntered through the walkway, letting his arms swing with newfound lightness, not speaking until he was only a couple yards behind Simon. 

“Matthew 27:5?” Kieren asked, a dry edge to his voice and his lip quirking in a slight teasing smile. “That’s not very insulting, is it? I think the bigoted vandals of Roarton may be loosing their touch.” Simon did not jump or turn, but set down the heavy paint with a deep breath he did not need. Kieren smiled fondly at the gesture, something like smoke beginning to spill into the bottom of his lungs. Simon straightened up with a huff, something that mocked a breathy laugh. 

_“ So Judas threw the money into the temple and left. Then he went away and hanged himself.”_ Simon recited, his head tilted slightly back to gaze at the message. Only then did he turn his head to look over his shoulder at the gaping boy behind him. Kieren searched for words, the smile suddenly gone, stumbling over the first syllables in a false start before forcing out a response.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Simon, is that a death threat?” Simon smiled wryly in response, although his eyes remained unwrinkled, humorless. 

“I think it’s more of a suggestion, really.” His tone was light, but his eyes, ever-honest, showed that he was watching Kieren, gauging his reaction.

“Jesus Christ,” Kieren repeated lowly, taking a jerky step forward. He stared at the message before he met Simon’s eyes, his fingers fisting unconsciously in sleeves of the sweater he had taken with him two nights before. With a sudden fierceness, Kieren pushed up the sleeves of the borrowed turtleneck, ignoring the scars he revealed, neatly stitched up and clean, and stepped forward to Simon’s abandoned paint bucket. He snatched the brush, clutching the wooden handle more tightly that he knew was necessary, and with quick, angry strokes, he covered the offending message. Simon watched him wordlessly, his face blank. Kieren dropped the brush there, on the gray stone walkway, and stepped back to Simon, placing a tight hand on the other man’s wrist. His eyes stayed trained on the hastily covered wall.

“You’re not… you’re not going away, yeah? You’re not going anywhere.” Kieren whispered, low and intense. Only then did he turn to Simon, imploringly, and Simon felt himself caught in Kieren’s pale gaze. There were no more muddy contact lenses, no more offensively tinted cover up smeared on his face, he was just Kieren; pure and and biblical and beautiful. His own voice echoes in Simon’s head, _the First Risen. You should see him…_

“Yeah,” Simon replies, voice deep, and gravely with sudden emotion. They stare at each other, breath measured and careful. Less delicate; they are no longer afraid of crushing this fragile thing between their two bodies, their two stubborn souls. Kieren’s eyes, already wide, grow even wider and his eyebrows lurch up. A sappy grin stretches across his face, and he lifts a tentative hand to cup Simon’s cheek.

“Kieren, I—“ Simon begins the sentence on shaky, newborn legs.

    “Shut up,” Kieren cuts him off, staring at his lips in wonder. He traces a delicate, long finger over Simon’s lower lip, and lets out a useless, slow breath, blinking hard.

“Purple. Deep. Like the indigo sky in a far away desert,” He says, almost reverently, and Simon is stuck by the fact that this boy, this poetry and verse beneath his hands, coming back to life, is his, loves him.

“Your lips are purple. And they’re beautiful,” Kieren is almost giddy now, drawing breaths punctuated with something that is related to laughter.

“It’s coming back. It must be the drugs, repairing my body. Simon, my color is coming back. My world is coming back. You brought it back. You aren’t going away,” Kieren is nonsensical now, words rushing out of his mouth like he has released a long-held current. Simon is smiling, staring, a ghost of warmth blooming inside of him. A tenderness stirs in him, unlike anything from his first life, but he is not afraid. He will not disappear. He will shade in this entire town for Kieren, if he lets him.

Kieren drops his hand from Simon’s face to his other hand, grasping tightly, frantic, still hungrily gazing at Simon’s newly colored face. Kieren Walker leads him to the bungalow, and Simon Monroe follows. He will always follow, no matter what colors the world is shrouded in.

**Author's Note:**

> check out my tumblr pissoffpotter.tumblr.com
> 
> feedback is always appreciated


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